Pennywise Lives

They thought they had killed it. They were wrong.
And now IT’s back! And angry. And very hungry.


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Love it. Only thing that could be a bit better is the contrast to make it jump out more.

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I like the original version. It plays better to the light sources and keeps it darker and more macabre.

Thanks, bigbad.
I also changed boy’s sight direction slightly (it was a little bit off).

If this was animated… like pennywise make a sudden look at me as viewer I would poop myself a little.

The lighting feels a little poor to me for an IT picture. All the rest is great though.

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Lighting never was my strongest skill. Can you elaborate (it might come in handy in my next projects)?

This looks great! It seems like it has the potential to be really terrifying, just a few changes in the lighting would help. I’m not an expert and you seem to be a lot better at this than me, but I’m going to take a few guesses as to what might make this better. First, I think it would help if the light appeared to come from just one or two sources, those being the yellow light from the right side and the maybe the washing machine. I don’t know what that white light is that’s reflecting off of Pennywise’s head, but I think you should do away with it. It doesn’t really make sense, because I imagine this being in a small dark laundry room. That light kind of suggests that the room’s bigger and has more to it, and that makes it sort of confusing. Then I would consider making it a lot darker, especially in the background. I understand you’re probably trying to make the light show off your Pennywise model, and you do have plenty of reason to be proud of it, but it might look scarier if it was dark enough that he almost blended with the background, only visible where the intense yellow light strikes his face and body. Finally, I really can’t tell how hard the light is because I’m kind of a noob at lighting myself, but if it’s not already as hard as it can get, maybe try making the lighting a little bit harder. That should bring out more sharp details and make it look a lot scarier.

Freelix2000 made good points. Here’s what I would add on the following topics :

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Darkness :

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The unseen is often said to be the best driver of fear, which is why darkness is the friend of horror pictures.
Here are the corrections I’d make in that regard :

  • The ceiling looks unnecessarily bright and really prevents Pennywise’s face (the main focus area) from popping out. The light could be much more oriented towards him. Plus it seems the yellow light just comes from an open door, which is perfect for chiaroscuro but not much exploited here.

  • The blueish light on the left, I’d forget about it. Keep that lighting setup for pretty things (or lazy movie posters), not creepy things. It actually removes creepiness from the image rather than adding anything. The most common mistake in lighting is to think that light just adds to the image and shows things, while many times the opposite is true. Darkness can cause the viewer to wonder what’s in it.
    One of my art teachers always said :
    “Showing is trying to hide your artistic weakness. Hiding is inviting to look to find your artistic strength.”

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Meaning :

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More generally, neither light nor darkness are by essence what calls for attention, hides or shows.
They need meaning in their context to do so.

  • This blueish light has no meaning in the context of the scene (at least that I found). The light from the open door, that one does : it shows the way out. And it would be even scarier if Pennywise was standing between it and the boy.
  • the light coming from the inside of the washing machine, that one has meaning too. IT has magic powers and can appear from anywhere. Plus the little holes in the machine kind of give a “circus” feel to it, like a circus mirror with lightbulbs around or something. You could even make the holes more spaced out and a little bigger to increase that “circus” effect. The problem is, we don’t notice them because so many parts of the scene have the same brightness, which goes back to the darkness argument.
  • the glowing eyes are a great idea but again with such brightness on IT’s face, it doesn’t serve much purpose. I wouldn’t lit its entire face, just the scary part (the mouth), leaving the eyes popping,
    like this :


I’m sure the semi-closed door allows for such a setup.

At the end lighting is a lot of testing and most of the times, several completely different setups can work great. One lighting setup I would try is a very dark scene with a much narrower yet more intense light coming from the door, ending below Pennywise’s eyes. Just an idea. Could also be variants around that.
Switching Pennywise’s place to block the way out would be great too but would bring new difficulties for the lighting setup. I don’t know exactly how it could be addressed.

Freelix2000, ChameleonScales
Thank you, guys, for such an elaborate explanation. Now I see that I need to study lighting harder (which is hard, because I really like modeling, but not very fond of texturing and lighting).
I think I’ll leave this image as it is now, but I want to render it in high resolution and print myself a poster somewhere in the future (in a month, or two), so I’ll try to take into account your advice.

If you don’t want to be a generalist, why not collaborate and ask someone else to do the parts you don’t want to do ? Not that I’m applying, I don’t have the time but I’m sure plenty of people would have fun lighting this kind of scene.

Looks pretty detailed, nicely done!


easy research paper

Well, actually I do like to be a generalist (for now, who knows, maybe in the future, with more experience, I will specialize). I just don’t like all stages of production equally. It’s like cooking: many people like cooking, and I’m sure all like eating good food, but who likes to wash the dishes :)?

I understand, although to correct your comparison, lighting is part of the artistic process while washing dishes is not part of the cooking process. You could say lighting is like making sauces and maybe you don’t like making sauces, but washing dishes is more comparable to managing your files and taking care of your computer, because that’s not making CGI, but it’s a necessary side task that comes with the job.

Anyway, if you wanna do it all by yourself, go for it, but for such great modeling and composition skills, not taking good care of the lighting is like preparing a great meal and burning it in the oven.

I hope it’ll come to me eventually.

So I understand you don’t want to spend a bunch more time on this, but maybe if you’re going to re-render it anyway, try just deleting that one white light for a re-render, and don’t bother with anything else. I didn’t realize it before, but I think that’s the only thing lighting up the ceiling too, so it could solve a few problems all at once and make it look a lot better without much effort.

I think I could separate the scene into more layers. That’ll give me even more ways to manipulate the final image. I also have an idea for the “ominous” light: I’ll try making some sort of chinks between washing machine parts and let the light come through them and from under the buttons.

Absolutely nightmare inducing. You really hit the mark here. And extra points for creativity with the dryer!

Thank you!

I changed the lighting slightly. Is it better or worse?


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